by Paul Preuss
“So noted.” Here I snuck a glance at Sergei, to see how Karpukhin’s operative was taking all this. Alas, the poor lad had been working too valiantly at his vodka—but who could keep up with a journalist of the old school like Joe?—and seemed to have gone to sleep sitting up.
“What the men of the Pequod saw floating on the water,” Joe continued, as if he’d been on the scene himself, viddiecorder in hand, “was a ‘vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream color, innumerable long arms radiating from its center, curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas.’”
“Just a minute,” said Sergei, suddenly awake. His expression was that of a sleepwalker; Joe and I regarded him with alarm. “What’s a furlong?” he said, with exaggerated clarity.
Joe and I exchanged glances. “It’s an eighth of an English mile, actually,” Joe carefully explained.
“Oh,” said Sergei, “in that case…” and, after a momentous pause, his eyes closed and his head declined.
Joe looked at me, embarrassed. “I’m sure Melville didn’t mean that literally. A creature over two hundred meters in length and breadth? But remember, here was a man who met sperm whales every day, who was groping for a unit of length to describe something a lot bigger. So he jumped from fathoms to furlongs. That’s my theory, anyway.”
I pushed away the remaining untouchable portions of my curry and looked up at Joe with curiously mixed feelings. “I’m a busy lad—I’m afraid I’ve got to get my beauty sleep.” I nodded toward Sergei, whose blissful snores were getting louder by the moment. “If you want a taste of the local nightlife, old friend, get going. It may be your last chance to escape.”
I rose and excused myself. Joe remained seated, studying me. “If you think you’ve scared me out of my job,” I said carefully, “you’ve failed miserably. But I promise you this. When I do meet a giant squid. I’ll snip off a tentacle and bring it back as a souvenir.”
26
Klaus Muller’s account continued:
I didn’t have time for the viddie news that morning, although I gathered from my crew that it was filled with news of the approaching alien ship that my boys had been so eager to find in our telescope. Seems it was right on schedule, still due to cross Earth orbit at a distance described tersely as “arbitrarily close,” right at the spring equinox.
Well, I had more urgent things to worry about than the end of the world.
Less than twenty-four hours after Joe Watkins’s disquisition upon the squid I was settled into our company’s Lobster, sinking slowly through cold black water toward the damaged power grid. There was no way to keep the operation secret: as we went under, Joe was an interested spectator, watching from a nearby launch (with Sergei watching Joe, indeed trying frantically to distract his attention with who-knows-what comic monologue, but to no avail). Apparently my own feeble effort the night before to tempt Joe with the local flesh-pots (of whose existence I had no real evidence) had come to nothing.
That was the Russians’ problem, not mine. I had tried to persuade Shapiro to take Joe into his confidence, but Karpukhin had vetoed the notion. One could almost see him thinking—why should a North American newshound turn up at this very moment?—ignoring the obvious answer that Trincomalee was about to be big news in any event.
There is nothing in the least exciting or glamorous about deep-water operations, if they’re done properly. Excitement means lack of foresight, which means incompetence. As one of the early Antarctic explorers, a survivor when others courted death, had put it, “Tragedy was not our business.” The incompetent do not last long in my business. Nor do those who crave excitement. I went about my job with all the pent-up emotion of a plumber dealing with a leaking faucet.
The grids had been designed for easy maintenance, since sooner or later we knew they would have to be replaced. Luckily none of the threads of this section had been damaged, and the securing nuts came off easily when gripped with the power wrench. I switched control to the heavy-duty claws and lifted out the damaged grid without the slightest difficulty.
It’s bad tactics to hurry an underwater operation; if you try to do too much at once you’re liable to make mistakes. (And if things go smoothly and you finish in a day a job you said would take a week, the client feels he hasn’t had his money’s worth.) So, although I was sure I could have replaced the grid that same afternoon, I followed the damaged unit up to the surface and closed shop for the day.
The thermoelement was rushed off for an autopsy, and I spent the rest of the evening hiding from Joe Watkins, whose curiosity was relentless. Trinco is a small town, but I managed to keep out of his way by visiting the local cinema, where I sat through several hours of an interminable Tamil epic in which three successive generations suffered identical domestic crises of mistaken identity, drunkenness, desertion, death, and insanity, all in full Sensovision—vibrant color, too-realistic smells, and Surround-sound turned to earthquake level.
Thus, I managed not only to avoid Joe, I also avoided learning anything much about what was going on in the skies above us.
Next morning, despite a mild headache, I was at the site soon after dawn. (So was Joe, and so was Sergei, the two of them all set for a quiet day’s fishing…) I cheerfully waved to them as I climbed into the Lobster; the tender’s crane lowered me over the side.
Over the other side, where Joe couldn’t see it, went the replacement grid. A few fathoms down I lifted it out of the hoist and carried it to the bottom of Trinco Deep, where by the middle of the afternoon I had it re-installed, without any trouble. Before I surfaced again, the lock nuts had been secured, the conductors spot-welded, and the engineers on the beach had completed their continuity tests.
A quick and easy success: by the time I was back on deck the system was under load once more, everything was back to normal, and even Karpukhin was smiling—except when he thought to ask himself the questions that no one had yet been able to answer.
I still clung to the falling-boulder theory, for want of a better. And I hoped that the Russians would accept it, so that we could stop this silly cloak-and-dagger business with Joe.
No such luck, I realized, when both Shapiro and Karpukhin came to see me with very long faces.
“Klaus,” said Lev, “we want you to go down again.”
“Well, it’s your money,” I replied. “What do you want me to do?”
“We’ve examined the damaged grid. There’s a section of the thermoelement missing. Dimitri thinks that … someone … has deliberately broken it off and carried it away.”
“Then they did a damned clumsy job,” I answered. “I can promise you it wasn’t one of my people.”
Karpukhin never laughed, so I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t laugh now. But neither did Lev, and on reflection I realized I wasn’t even amused myself. By this time I was beginning to think the suspicious Mr. Karpukhin might not be so far off the beam.
The sun was setting over the interior, in one of those typically lavish tropical sunsets, as I began my last dive of the day into Trinco Deep. Day’s end has no meaning down there, of course; below about five hundred meters it is always dark. I fell more than seven hundred meters without lights, because I like to watch the luminous creatures of the sea as they flash and flicker in the darkness, sometimes exploding like rockets just outside the observation window. In these open waters there was no danger of collision, and in any case I had the panoramic sonar scan running, which gave far better warning than my eyes.
As I approached eight hundred meters I sensed that something was wrong. The bottom was coming into view on the vertical sounder—but it was approaching much too slowly, meaning that my rate of descent was far too slow. I could increase it easily enough by flooding another buoyancy tank, but I hesitated to do so. In my business, anything out of the ordinary needs an explanation; three times I have saved my life by waiting until I had one.
The thermometer gave me the answer. The temperature outside was five degrees higher than it sh
ould have been, and I am sorry to say that it took me several seconds to realize why. My only excuse was that I had had no occasion to visit the grid since it had become operational.
A couple of hundred meters below me the repaired grid was running at full power, pouring out megawatts of heat as it tried to equalize the temperature difference between Trinco Deep and the Solar Pond up there on land. It wouldn’t succeed, of course, but in the attempt it was generating electricity—and I was being swept upward in the geyser of warm water that was the incidental by-product.
When I finally did manage to reach the grid, it was quite difficult to keep the Lobster in position against the upwelling current, and I began to sweat uncomfortably as the heat penetrated the cabin. Being too hot at the bottom of the sea was a novel experience. So also was the mirage-like vision caused by the ascending water, which made my searchlights dance and tremble over the rock face I was exploring.
You must picture me, then, lights ablaze in that thousand-meter darkness, moving slowly down the slope of the canyon, which at this spot was about as steep as the roof of the house. The missing element—if it was still in the neighborhood—could not have fallen very far before coming to rest. I would find it in ten minutes or not at all.
After an hour’s searching, I had turned up several broken light bulbs (it’s astonishing how many get thrown overboard from ships—the sea beds of the world are covered with them), an empty beer bottle (same comment), and a brand-new boot. That was the last thing I found—
—before I discovered that I was no longer alone.
I never switch off the sonar scan. Even when I’m not moving and involved in something else I always glance at the screen at least once a minute to check the general situation. The situation now was that a large object—at least the size of the Lobster—was approaching from the north. When I spotted it, the range was about two hundred meters and closing slowly. I switched off my lights, cut the jets, which I had been running at low power to stabilize me in the turbulent water, and let the Lobster drift in the current.
Though I was tempted to call Lev Shapiro and report that I had company, I decided to wait for more information. There were only three administrative regions on the whole planet owning submersibles that could operate at this depth, and I was on excellent terms with all of them—in fact; I was on social terms with the majority of their rated crewmembers. It would never do to be too hasty and get myself involved in unnecessary political complications.
I did not wish to advertise my presence. Anyone working at this depth would have to use lights, and I ought to be able to see them coming long before they could see me. Therefore, though I felt blind without sonar, I reluctantly switched it off and relied on my eyes. Perhaps it was my imagination, but a curiously musical sound seemed to ring faintly against the hull of my vessel; I rechecked and assured myself that the sonar was in passive mode.
The quasi-musical sound grew louder. I waited in the hot, silent little cabin, straining my eyes into the darkness, tense and alert but not particularly worried.
First I saw a dim glow, at an indefinite distance. It grew bigger and brighter, yet refused to shape itself into any pattern that my mind could recognize. The diffuse glow concentrated into myriad spots, until it seemed that a constellation was sailing toward me. Thus might the rising star clouds of the Galaxy appear from some world close to the Milky Way.
That mental image momentarily brought to mind a correlate, an image of the great diamond-bright alien spacecraft then approaching our world, but nothing sustained the accidental connection.
It is not true that people are frightened of the unknown; we can be truly frightened only by the known, the already experienced. While I could not imagine what was approaching, I was sure that no creature of the sea could touch me inside ten centimeters of good Swiss armor plate.
The thing was almost upon me, glowing with the light of its own creation, when it split into two separate clouds. Slowly they came into focus—not of my eyes, for I had always seen them clearly, but of my understanding—and I knew that beauty and terror were rising toward me out of the abyss.
The terror came first, when I saw that the approaching beasts were squids. All Joe’s tales reverberated in my brain. Then, with a considerable sense of letdown, I realized that they were only about seven meters long—hardly longer than my Lobster, and a mere fraction of its mass! They could do me no harm.
Quite apart from that, their indescribable beauty robbed them of all menace.
This may sound ridiculous, but it is true: in my travels I have seen most of the animals of the undersea world, but none to match the luminous apparitions floating before me now. The colored lights that pulsed and danced along their bodies made them seem clothed in jewels—never the same for two seconds at a time. There were patches that glowed a brilliant blue like flickering mercury arcs, then changed almost instantly to burning neon red. Their tentacles, preceding them through the water, seemed like strings of luminous beads—or the lamps along an auto super-guideway, when you look down upon it from the air at night. Barely visible against this background glow were their enormous yellow eyes, uncannily human and intelligent despite their cat-like slit pupils, each surrounded by a diadem of shining pearls.
I am sorry, but that is the best I can do in words. Only a high-resolution viddiegram could do justice to these living kaleidoscopes. I do not even know how long I watched them, so entranced by their luminous beauty that I had almost forgotten my mission. Oh, and I must not fail to mention the music! The complex harmonics that filled the Lobster were nothing like the chittering of fish, or even the mournful groans and whistles of the great whales…
It was quickly apparent that those delicate, whiplash tentacles could not possibly have broken the grid—that much was obvious. Yet the presence of these creatures here was, to say the least, very curious. Karpukhin would have called it highly zuzpizhus, or whatever the word is in Russian.
I was about to call the surface when I comprehended something incredible. It had been before my eyes all the time, but I had not realized it until now… The squids were talking to each other.
Those glowing, evanescent patterns were not coming and going at random. They were as meaningful, I was suddenly sure, as the illuminated signs of New Broadway or Old Piccadilly. Every few seconds there was an image that almost seemed to make sense, but it vanished before I could make sense of it.
I knew, of course, that even the common octopus exhibits emotional changes with lightning-fast color changes. But this was something of a much brighter order, real communication. Here were two living electric signs, flashing messages to each other.
My doubts vanished. I am no scientist, but at that moment I shared the sort of feelings I imagine a Leibniz or an Einstein or an Aggasiz might have felt at the moment of some penetrating revelation. For then I saw an image of the Lobster, evanescent but unmistakable. This would make me famous…
The images I imagined I saw (no, was certain I saw) moving over the rippling flesh of the squids now changed in a most curious manner. The Lobster reappeared, I thought, rather smaller. Beside it, much smaller still, were two peculiar objects—each consisting of a pair of bright dots surrounded by ten radiating lines.
As I said a little earlier, we Swiss are good at languages. But I flatter myself that it took a little extra intelligence to deduce that this was a formalized squid’s-eye view of itself … and that what I had seen, before it vanished forever, was a crude sketch of the situation in which all of us found ourselves.
A nagging thought: why the absurdly small size of the squids, as they pictured themselves? Were they squids? Their light show had distracted me from certain other anatomical differences, which made them seem not much like familiar examples of their biological family…
I had no time to puzzle this out. A third squid symbol had appeared on the living screens, and this one was enormous, completely dwarfing others. The message shone in the eternal night for a few seconds before one of the two
creatures, retaining it, shot off at incredible speed, and my sonar reflected the rippling currents of its water jet. I was left alone with its companion.
The meaning of this act seemed all too obvious. “My God,” I muttered to myself, “they think they can’t handle me! That one’s been sent to fetch Big Brother.” Of Big Brother’s capabilities I already had better evidence than Joe Watkins’s anecdotes, for all his research and his clippings. So you won’t be surprised to hear that at this point I decided not to linger in the vicinity.
But before I went, I thought I would try some talking myself.
After hanging there in darkness for so long, I had forgotten the power of my lights. They hurt my eyes—and they must have been agonizing to the unfortunate squid in front of me. Transfixed by that intolerable glare, with its own illumination utterly quenched, it lost all its beauty and became no more than a pallid bag of gray jelly with two big black buttons for its eyes. For a moment it seemed paralyzed by the shock; then it darted after its companion.
I soared upward through the black waters like a child’s errant helium balloon through the sky, seeking the surface of a world that would never be the same again.
27
Klaus Muller’s memoire continues:
There was consternation on the viddie nets; so I gathered within a minute or two of sticking my head out of the Lobster’s hatch.
That an alien ship was within hours of Earth was old news now, several days old. Since it wasn’t going to actually hit the Earth, who really cared anymore? No, the new news was, there was another alien ship in the skies, apparently identical to the first, which had suddenly appeared in the Mainbelt and was now accelerating on a converging course with the first—they were on a collision course with each other!
At Trinco Control they gave only a mild damn about all that—it was astronomers’ business. Lev Shapiro and the rest were power engineers, and kept their attention focused resolutely oceanward.
